O’Hara laid the silent form out on the edge of the outrigger’s grating. All that day O’Hara and I kept our backs turned towards that silent form, lying there, face downwards. I told O’Hara to lay Soogy like that. I couldn’t stand seeing those earnest eyes staring all night up at the merciless infinity of stars.
The old fugitive became insane. We only saw his head move; he had covered it over with a bit of sacking to keep the sun’s rays off.
“Forgive me, Cissie—forgive me, Cissie; keep the keys—keep the keys,” he kept saying over and over again in his delirium. The sky was no longer a sky to me, it was a monstrous slab lying over a mighty vault wherein the dead still breathed as they floated and tossed their arms in agony on illimitable waters.
Soogy’s death seemed to revive O’Hara and me; yet we said very little to each other. It was a world of dreams that we stared in, some phantasmagorial existence where only death whispered as the outrigger plopped in the star-mirroring deep around us. O’Hara was no longer my pal in sorrow; we had become rivals in some terrible struggle of will-power. The energy of the whole universe seemed to be wholly concentrated on one vital move on the tremendous chess-board of that phantasmal world of water whereon we drifted. O’Hara and I were the sorrowing slaves of Fate; nothing else existed, only he and I and the dreadful thought as to which one of us must put forth our hand and make that terrible move. It was inevitable that one of us must do it, for on those tropic seas there was no other way than to crawl out on the outrigger and push that small dead form into the vast depths that moved around us. The tropic moon loomed on the horizon. It might have been the uprising sun, for all I knew, in that world of horror that I had been plunged into. I looked over the canoe’s side and gazed into the glassy depths. I saw a great shark gliding along under the surface. It seemed natural that it should be there, waiting for us. I gazed in a languid, interested way as that cannibal of the deep turned softly over on its back and revealed its shining belly. Its cruel, monstrous mouth looked like some materialized jaw of pallid hate as it softly snapped at my shadow that lay in the moonlit deep, and severed it in two! Then O’Hara dissolved into some cobweb-like substance and was blown away on the puff of wind that crept across the hot seas.
Dawn came like a mighty torrent of silver and swept across the silent world of waters. I felt that I was floating across shadow-seas. For a little while I heard a faint moaning and felt cool sea-water slashing over me. I tried to move, but something held my feet down in a merciless grip. It was all the more terrible because I realized in some mysterious way that I was far at sea on that castaway canoe. The fact was, that a breeze had sprung up and the canoe was being tossed wildly to and fro. Why none of us was thrown out is a mystery. Anyhow, the blow was of short duration, for I suddenly lifted my head, and saw O’Hara and the old gentleman lying perfectly still beside me. Then the world seemed to change again: night fell over the sea. Again I watched that silent form lying out on the grating. Again the dawn sent grey wings along the eastern horizon. It was then that I became strangely calm, and, terrible as the sight was, as that child lay dead on the grating of the canoe, I smiled and looked upon it all as the most commonplace of experiences.
“Good-bye, Soogy,” I said, then I gently pushed the small figure from the bamboo-outrigger. Some terrible spell of curiosity gripped me. I stared down into the water in wistful fascination, as, leaning over, I watched the spot where the ripples spread, where the small form had gone down, down into the clear, still ocean depth at dawn. I could still distinctly see Soogy sinking down into the grave! It looked like the figure of some tiny child imaged in some vast crystal mirror as down, down it went. Only the mournful cry of a solitary sea-bird, as it passed across the sky and sent a shadow over that wandering grave, broke the stillness. Then I saw the figure begin to sway rhythmically to some deep ocean current. Presently it looked no bigger than a penny terra-cotta-coloured doll.
Ah, I had hoped to find that it was all a dream as I still watched, rubbed my eyes, and hoped with a terrible hope. I well knew, as that tiny remnant of mortality faded from sight, that I was living in some terrible sorrow of reality. I thought of those forest dances away in Fiji, of the weird, tender glances of those deep, golden-iris eyes, when Soogy crept out of the forest palms to make my bed. I remembered the sweet, weird song the heathen child had sung to me, and how the witch-like little singer had stared across the camp-fire till I had felt some strange fright! But the mystery of it all had vanished, for, on the second night after the storm, O’Hara and I had discovered the truth—Soogy was no boy at all, but a half-caste Polynesian girl!
A great silence seemed to come over the world after Soogy sank from sight. And then my dreams were broken, and I fancied I could hear the breakers beating against eternity. Someone touched me softly on the brow, and a voice said:
“Try and stand on your feet; we’re saved, pal.”
I half realized something, and sat up. I looked immediately to the southward and saw the eternal wastes of sea-skyline, then I glanced round and noticed that our canoe was tossing about on a heavy swell just off a rocky coast. We were so near the reefs that I could head the soughing of the wind along the bending tracts of shore palms (it turned out to be the Tonga Islands). O’Hara was sitting on the bamboo grating of the canoe’s outrigger. His face appeared extremely thin and was ghastly pale. The aged fugitive sat huddled by the prow, his battered clerical hat held in his trembling hand, his chin on his chest, a wild look in his eyes. They both looked like emaciated phantom-figures, quite unreal. Only at that moment in my life did I realize in a flash how we mortals are but shadows moving through some dream that divides our existence from the boundless reality of the great shadowland. True enough, too, I had awakened from a terrible reality into a darker dream.